I wasn’t planning to talk to anyone that night. I had gone out mostly because I couldn’t stand the silence in my apartment. It was a Thursday, cold and dark, as Stockholm tends to be from October to… well, May. My plan was simple: one drink, a bit of people-watching, maybe a quiet walk home if the mood felt right.
Instead, I met her.
I won’t use her real name—she never gave it to me anyway—but let’s call her Ava. It fits her, somehow. The kind of name you remember, even if you don’t know why.
The Bar, the Mood, the Unexpected Connection
It was one of those semi-fancy cocktail bars in Östermalm. Velvet chairs, moody lighting, overpriced drinks served by bartenders who act like they’re doing you a favor. I found a corner seat and ordered a Negroni. Two stools away, Ava was sipping champagne like she wasn’t in Stockholm at all, but somewhere much warmer.
She caught my eye because of her laugh. Not loud or forced, but warm and real. She was talking to a man, maybe mid-40s, clean suit, too-polished shoes. I could tell he wasn’t from here. He looked unsure, but intrigued. She looked like she’d seen his type a hundred times before.
He left after maybe fifteen minutes. No awkwardness, no goodbye kiss. Just a polite nod and a bill paid without discussion.
And then she turned to me and said, “You look like someone who’s thinking too much.”
I almost choked on my drink. She smiled, not in a flirtatious way, but like someone who sees through your layers and doesn’t mind.
I laughed, a little nervously. “Maybe. Or maybe I’m just judging everyone here.”
“Even better,” she said. “That means you’re still curious.”
“You’re Not What I Expected”
We started talking. Small things, at first—how the bar had terrible music, how people in Stockholm never seem to flirt, how expensive wine has no right to taste that bland. Then I asked her, casually: “Was that guy your… date?”
She looked at me for a second too long, then shrugged. “Something like that.”
And then, she told me.
Not in a dramatic way. She wasn’t trying to shock me. She just said it like it was a fact: “I’m an escort. He was a client. A boring one, to be honest.”
I didn’t know what to say. I had never spoken to an escort before. At least, not knowingly. And she didn’t look like how I imagined one to look. No heavy makeup, no provocative clothes. Just a confident woman in a black silk blouse and heels that looked too expensive for this bar.
I told her that. She laughed.
“You’re not what I expected either,” she said.
What She Taught Me in Under an Hour
We talked for maybe 45 minutes. No judgment, no filters. And in that short window, she completely shattered what I thought I knew.
“People think I sell sex. I don’t. I sell control. I sell calm.”
She said most of her clients weren’t looking for pornographic fantasies. They wanted emotional connection, silence, reassurance. Some of them just wanted to talk. Some wanted to feel desired again. Some just wanted a moment without having to perform.
She didn’t romanticize her job. She said it was exhausting sometimes. Lonely. But also empowering, in ways she couldn’t explain to most people.
“When you walk into a room and someone is already grateful you’re there, that’s a kind of power. Not everyone can handle it.”
She never saw herself as a victim. She wasn’t being forced, she wasn’t “saving up for college” as a cliché. She did it because it fit her lifestyle, and because it gave her a strange kind of freedom. Financially, emotionally. She set her rules. She chose her clients. She had boundaries.
I asked her if she ever got scared.
“All the time,” she said. “But not of the men. Of losing myself in the game. Of forgetting who I am outside it.”
That hit me harder than I expected.
Leaving the Bar with a Different Kind of Clarity
When we left the bar, she kissed me lightly on the cheek and said, “You write, don’t you?”
I didn’t ask how she knew. She just… did.
“If you ever write about this,” she said, “don’t make me sound like a saint or a tragedy. Just make me real.”
So here I am, writing this, months later. I’ve never seen her again. I don’t know if she still works, or if she ever reads random blogs at 3 a.m. But I think about her more often than I thought I would.
Because she reminded me that people are rarely what you expect. And sometimes, the most honest conversations happen between two strangers who have no reason to lie.
– Nora